O.K., the planet is officially out of (or back in?) alignment: American farmers are making money hand over fist while the hedge fund guys are wishing they’d put a little more cash under the mattress. Corn growers in the United States can no longer keep pace with the staggering global demand for the raw material of corn syrup and ethanol and so, seemingly out of nowhere, there’s a demand for more farmland.That just looks wrong on the page!

But it’s true. We are running out of farmland and some people, like finance guru James Cramer in his recent column for New York magazine urging readers to invest in farm supply equipment, are suggesting — only a little facetiously — that housing developments may need to be razed to clear the way for more farmland.

That sounds crazy, but it really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: for decades, we’ve systematically razed nearly every patch of land we’ve been able to in an effort to create more room for industry, technology and people, without really paying attention to what’s being lost in the process. With scores of homes being abandoned because of the current mortgage debacle, some innovative rethinking is going to have to happen around overbuilt subdivisions, master planned communities and urban high rises.

Not long ago, any visions of an agrarian return would have been chalked up to nostalgia: today, such conjurings don’t seem so far-fetched. And indeed, the purposeful reclamation of urban and suburban lands is serious fodder for artists, architects and academics alike.

Creating open space where others wouldn’t think to look for it is a trademark of architect David Baker, who, for Curran House, an affordable housing project in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, designed roof gardens with small individual container garden plots allowing residents to cultivate their own crops.

And, by persuading the developers and the City of San Francisco to lose the proposed parking lot (an accomplishment of epic proportions in the realm of residential construction), Baker created an open-air gathering space at the back of the building’s lobby — accessed, cleverly, by a roll-up door typically used for garages.

Photos: Marion Brenner

Other groups, like Urban Ecology, are exploring open spaces and multi-use paths for underutilized spaces like between railroad tracks and under off ramps. New York’s High Line project has of course helped lead the way.

There’s a new novel out in which the real estate developer hero comes to love the animals displaced by his livelihood. After his conversion, the protagonist says: “If the oceans were dead and the forests replaced by pavement even empire would be robbed of its consequence.”

Lydia Millet’s “How the Dead Dream” is, of course, fiction. but in reality, architect and educator Fritz Haeg is exploring ways to reclaim land for animals like owls, bobcats, turtles and squirrels that have been displaced by development. (My friend’s family pet was bitten by a rattlesnake in Orange County last year, but not because that snake had developed a particular taste for dachshunds.) Haeg’s Animal Estates project, currently on view as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, proposes the reintroduction of animals back into our cities, strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards, parking lots and neighborhoods. In a series of traveling exhibits throughout the country over the course of the year, he will develop a variety of potential animal dwellings and hopes to determine which ones would most effectively welcome animals back to their natural habitats.

Haeg also explores the reclamation of land not just for animals but for plants with his Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn project. Launched in 2005 with a prototype garden in Salina, Kan., the geographic center of the United States, Edible Estates aims to effect change in urban and suburban communities alike by urging residents to eat their lawns rather than mow them. (Did you know that homeowners use up to 10 times more chemical pesticides per acre on their lawns than farmers use on crops?) There are now nine such projects throughout the United States and abroad.

Photos: Courtesy of Fritz Haeg

Haeg is essentially proposing a clever twist on the long-established community gardens, which were used to help increase food supply after both world wars. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture stressed the importance of fresh vegetable consumption, the Victory Garden Program was born, just after World War I, leading to the production of approximately 40 percent of fresh vegetables consumed from some 20 million gardens. (For more information, see City Farmer.)

Photo: Los Angeles Public Library

Community gardens, like this one in Santa Monica, Calif., continue to propagate like so many seedlings throughout the country.

Photos: Bryan Burkhart

Victory Gardens are also making a comeback: last year Garden for Environment and the City of San Francisco’s Department for the Environment developed Victory Gardens 2007, a pilot program that supports the transition of backyards, frontyards, window boxes, rooftops and unused land into food production areas.

Taking that notion even further is the Berkeley-based foundation SAGE (Sustainable Agriculture Education), which has been working to bring the urban and agrarian together. With the publication of its Urban Edge Agricultural Tool Kit in 2005, SAGE (Sustainable Agriculture Education) has pioneered the concept of Urban Edge Agricultural Parks – part working agriculture and part parkland. SAGE advocates for farmland at the edges of urban centers, particularly disused urban areas like Detroit, Mich. As manufacturing disappears and the food supply chain dwindles, why not reintroduce farmland?

Photo: Courtesy of SAGE

Our domestic landscape has become increasingly homogeneous, with little variation from place to place. I once visited a development in Fort Worth that varied from one I’d just come from in Phoenix only by the Lone Star tile embedded over the houses’ front doors. In a way, really, the runaway demand for — and planting of — corn seems to mimic the proliferation of generic, cookie-cutter homes nationwide.

Perhaps these innovative land reclamations can begin to have an impact on crop homogeneity. Looking at them reminded me of an article I’d read years ago that followed the chef and food evangelist Alice Waters as she strolled through a Paris farmer’s market and was increasingly made aware of all of the varieties of fruits and vegetables no longer cultivated.

The financial benefits of growing corn versus, say, heirloom tomatoes (though I imagine the Mortgage Lifter might be popular this year), or fava beans may be too hard for any farmer to pass up. That means that any helpful push toward agricultural (and architectural) diversity is welcomed — and imperative.